COMMON If you hear a piece of news through the grapevine or hear it on the grapevine, you are told it informally by someone who was told it by someone else. I heard through the grapevine that she was looking for work. She heard on the grapevine that he had come back to London. Note: One of the early telegraph systems in America was given the nickname `the grapevine telegraph' because the wires often became tangled, so that they reminded people of grapevines. During the American Civil War, the telegraph system was used to communicate propaganda and false information, as well as real news about the progress of battles, so that anything heard on the `grapevine' was likely to be unreliable.